About Us

Giigido Mikinaak is an Indigenous-owned business based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. We make physical and digital tools for Indigenous language learning, starting with Anishinaabemowin and building toward more languages over time.

Where this came from

The founder, Shyla Niemi, is Anishinaabekwe, Turtle Clan, with family from Gull Bay First Nation. She's second generation cut off, and like a lot of people in that position, she came to her language later in life.

Learning Anishinaabemowin changed something. It gave her a sense of belonging she hadn't been able to name before. It also gave her a close look at why so many people never start. The fear of saying words wrong. The guilt of not knowing more. The lack of access to fluent speakers. These aren't small barriers. They stop people before they even try.

Shyla spent two years as a language coordinator. One summer, she helped build drop-in language tables and game nights in Winnipeg. She watched people who were nervous and reluctant walk in and leave an hour later remembering words, laughing at their mistakes, and asking when the next one was. Games did that. Not because they made language easy, but because they made the fear smaller.

She also has a background in digital media design, web development, and UX. She built an Ojibwe language app in her final semester of college. When she graduated, she realized she didn't want to just build websites. She wanted to use those skills to make language learning more accessible. Giigido Mikinaak is what came from that.

Our Approach

Translations and audio recordings are developed in direct collaboration with fluent speakers. We name our collaborators with their permission because we believe that transparency about the source of knowledge matters. These aren't anonymous translations. They come from real people with real relationships to the language, and that should be visible.

We don't use AI to generate translations or language content. We don't allow our content to be used to train AI models. Language is more than words. It carries relationship, context, and reciprocity, and those things can't be extracted from a dataset.

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Where we're going

Ataage Agindaasonan is the first product with a Cree version planned for the future. The long-term vision is a growing collection of language learning tools across multiple Indigenous languages, built in collaboration with speakers and communities, and designed to meet learners wherever they're starting from.

Whether you're reconnecting after displacement, starting from zero, or looking for something to bring into your classroom or program, these tools are made with you in mind.